Authorities in Park County are investigating following the death of a juvenile after falling from a moving pumpjack in the Silvertip Oil Field north of Powell.
The Park County Sheriff's Office reported Monday that dispatchers were notified Saturday morning after someone walked into the Powell Police Department and said his juvenile friend had died after climbing onto a moving pumpjack and falling off.
The age, identity, or gender of the young victim wasn’t released.
Deputies, along with Park County Search and Rescue ground teams and a fixed-wing aircraft, searched the Elk Basin area because the reporting party did not know the exact location of the accident, according to the the sheriff’s office.
The juvenile was located shortly after 1 p.m. and pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators believe the victim died from blunt force trauma sustained in the fall, and an autopsy was scheduled for Monday.
The sheriff’s office said the investigation remains active, and the Park County Coroner’s Office declined to release the identity of the victim.
‘Easy To Forget How Dangerous They Are’
For retired oil field worker Eugene Brown, pumpjacks were just part of growing up in Wyoming.
Brown spent what he calls his “second childhood” in the oil patch, eventually building a 40-year career that took him to nearly every corner of the state, including fields near Cody from the 1980s through the early 2000s.
He said seeing kids climb on pumpjacks was never unusual.
“For some people, it’s a rite of passage,” Brown said about climbing on pumpjacks.
Brown said oil fields are a common part of daily life in places like Elk Basin and people can lose sight of how dangerous the equipment actually is.
Pumpjacks — the large, rocking “grasshopper” machines used to extract oil from wells — often sit in wide-open areas visible from roads, ranchland and small communities across Wyoming.
“Most likely they were just above the horse’s head, which is easy to slide right off,” Brown said, referring to the curved front end of the pumpjack’s massive moving beam.
Brown said many young people growing up around oil fields view the machinery less as industrial equipment and more as part of the landscape.
“It’s easy to forget how dangerous they can be,” he said, adding that he wonders if the juvenile in this case was a local or a tourist.
“The oil companies don’t do enough to educate people on that,” Brown said. “I doubt they knew just how dangerous climbing on them was.”
Questions About Safety
Cowboy State Daily reached out Monday to the Wyoming OSHA Consultation Program and the Petroleum Association of Wyoming seeking comment about oil field safety and whether incidents involving non-workers around pumpjacks are a concern.
Neither organization responded before publication.
Elk Basin, straddling the Wyoming-Montana border north of Powell, has been part of Wyoming’s oil industry for generations. Active pumpjacks dot the landscape throughout the area, where oil production has long been intertwined with everyday life.
For longtime oil field workers like Brown, that familiarity can sometimes blur the line between ordinary and deadly.
“They’re powerful machines,” he said. “People just don’t realize how fast something can go wrong.”
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
